Campaign Coverage via Snapchat Could Shake Up the 2016 Elections

During the 2008 presidential race, two online upstarts, Politico and The Huffington Post, elbowed their way onto the rope line and, for better or for worse, helped change the way campaigns were covered. In 2012, it was BuzzFeed’s turn. The site that specialized in cute kittens and funny lists turned up at the Iowa caucuses and sped up the news cycle even further, flooding Twitter feeds with tidbits from the trail.

Will 2016 be the Snapchat election?

The question arises after last week’s reports that Snapchat, America’s fastest-growing smartphone app, had hired Peter Hamby, a political reporter for CNN, to lead its nascent news division. Snapchat has said little about its plans, and both it and Mr. Hamby declined to comment for this article. But a couple of things are clear: A company known for enabling teenagers in various states of undress to send disappearing selfies to each other is getting into politics. And with well over 100 million users, a huge swath of whom are in the United States and between the ages of 18 and 31, its potential to shake up the next election is considerable.

“There is no harder riddle to solve in politics than reaching young Americans who are very interested in the future of their country but don’t engage with traditional news,” Dan Pfeiffer, a former senior adviser to President Obama, wrote to me in an email. “Snapchat may have just made it a whole lot easier to solve this riddle.”

There’s nothing quite like a presidential race for a new media company looking to make its presence known. Campaigns are pageants, and the candidates aren’t the only ones on stage; so, too, are the outlets that cover them. Break a story, push it out across social media, and you’re on the map.

That’s what happened with BuzzFeed, which was the first news organization to report that John McCain was endorsing Mitt Romney in early 2012, only three days after the site started covering the campaign. (An anonymously sourced story that Romney spray-tanned would come later.)

Snapchat is hardly the only social platform looking to beef up its content with the hope of better engaging its audience. Facebook has been talking to a number of media companies, including The New York Times, about hosting their articles and videos on its own servers, rather than driving users to their external sites.

But Snapchat is going a step further: It is creating its own content. This is something social platforms have generally been reluctant to do for the simple reason that it’s difficult. And expensive.

The latter won’t be a problem for Snapchat, which was recently valued at a staggering $15 billion by investors. It has the resources to hire a lot more editors and reporters, even if they won’t gather and deliver news in the traditional way.

What might Snapchat’s political coverage look like? This year, the company introduced a feature called “Discover,” which allows Snapchat’s media partners — CNN, Vice and ESPN among them — to post content to the app every 24 hours on their own Snapchat channel. Think of it as something akin to a cable TV bundle, only with content specifically meant, or at least edited, for Snapchat’s users, with a lot of bright colors and crisp images, plenty of videos and a minimum of text. It’s snack food for your smartphone.

On Comedy Central’s channel on Saturday, you could watch the comedians Key & Peele play Mayweather and Pacquiao at a prefight news conference. Vice’s channel opened with a story about drug use in China; swipe to the left and you’d find a video about Baltimore.

Snapchat also has its own channel: For now, you’re more likely to learn about Nicki Minaj performing at a bar mitzvah than you are about Rand Paul’s position on Iran. This could change under Mr. Hamby.

But maybe more interesting are the possibilities with regard to Snapchat’s “Live” feature. Here’s how Live works: The company drops a digital boundary, or “geofence,” around an event. Snapchat users within the boundary can upload their “snaps” — still images or video — to a Snapchat “story” built around the event. These snaps are stitched into a narrative by a team of Snapchat curators. They are basically home movies, shot by the app’s own users. Over the weekend, Snapchatters could watch reactions from England to the birth of the new royal baby or videos from the Kentucky Derby.

The audiences for some of Snapchat’s stories have been enormous. During a 24-hour stretch in January, nearly 25 million people tuned in to its coverage of New York’s “snowpocalypse.” Over three days in April, some 40 million watched Snapchat’s feed from the Coachella music festival. These are numbers that network executives can only dream about.

It’s easy to imagine Snapchat dropping a geofence around the Iowa State Fair during a candidate’s visit, or even around a presidential debate. Would these events be as popular among Snapchat’s users as a rock concert? Maybe not, but even a fraction of that viewership would be significant.

Mr. Hamby, who is 33, joined CNN in 2004 straight out of journalism school. He had a front-row seat as the web and smartphones eroded the network’s stature as an indispensable source of political news, especially during campaign season.

At CNN, Mr. Hamby developed a reputation for experimenting with new technology. He encouraged his CNN colleagues to use social media to promote their journalism and produced digital video shorts called “Hambycasts.”

But there’s something else about Mr. Hamby that makes him uniquely qualified — or uniquely unqualified — to lead Snapchat’s foray into politics. In 2013, he wrote a 95-page report for Harvard’s Shorenstein Center that criticized how campaigns were covered in the digital era.

In the report, Mr. Hamby does not romanticize an earlier age, when a handful of anointed reporters — the Boys on the Bus, as the writer Timothy Crouse called them — crafted the dominant political narrative of the day. But Mr. Hamby also disliked a lot of what he saw on the campaign trail in 2012. He writes that social media forced both reporters and campaigns “to adapt to a treacherous media obstacle course that incentivized speed, smallness and conflict, leaving little room for good will or great journalism — but plenty of tweets.”

The gist of Mr. Hamby’s complaint is that the hyperactive metabolism of today’s media and the general lack of access to the candidates have produced a lot of shallow, self-involved reporting. Can he reverse this trend working for an app whose multibillion-dollar valuation is built on the back of technology that makes selfies disappear after 10 seconds?

“It sounds ludicrous given how Snapchat started, but I don’t know what Snapchat is going to evolve into,” said Jeff Greenfield, a campaign trail veteran who is active on Twitter and said he was impressed by Mr. Hamby’s report.

Snapchat, with its celebration of the ephemeral, may wind up only contributing to the problems that Mr. Hamby identifies in his report. At the same time, the app’s popularity gives it the potential to bring millions of first-time voters into the political discourse.

Either way, campaigns will no doubt try to use the app to tap into the bloodstream of millennial voters.

“There are a lot of young people who are just killing time on their phones, who are on Snapchat and are not getting all that much exposure to political news right now,” said Tim Miller, a communications adviser for the potential Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush. “I doubt there will be any policy symposiums taking place on Snapchat, but you’ve got to find a way to reach people who aren’t reading long-form political articles.”

Of course, there’s peril here too. Snapchat has a particular sensibility — casual, fun, unforced. Content is delivered in colloquial shorthand. Bad news, and there isn’t much of it, might be followed by an “Ugh.” There is liberal use of emojis.

This is not a tone that will be easy for middle-aged politicians to get right. And getting it wrong could be painful for everyone involved. Especially the candidates.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: Shaking Up The Election, With Emojis. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe